iPlayer Released for Mac, Linux; Adobe Announces AIR for Linux

Zoxed writes "The BBC reports that their iPlayer has just been released for Mac and Linux (download page). It is based on Adobe Air, but unfortunately the service is only available to UK IP address, so I can not test it out from my adopted homeland of Germany. Perhaps a UK-based Slashdotter could review it?" In related news, an anonymous reader writes "Adobe has announced a Linux version of its AIR 1.5 runtime environment that is supposed to allow rich web apps developed on it to run on Fedora Core 8, Ubuntu 7.10 and openSuse 10.3 with no modification. The company released versions for Windows and Mac OS X back in November."

Proxy, anyone?

[panoptical2]

Could you use a UK-based proxy and download the player?

potential of Air ?

[jawadde]

I'm not a pro with flash development, but given the advances that javascript, CSS and DHTML are making, combined with stuff like squirrelfish extreme and the canvas object, how much potential does flash still have ? don't get me wrong : I don't want to go on a flash-bashing parade here ! I'm just wondering if the current state of javascript in modern browsers isn't up-to-par with flash for 90% of whatever flash is doing right now. The only advantages of flash are code-protection and vector graphics. But I can't really see a bonus for either of those two when it comes to rich-application-development : vectors are irrelevant here, and anyone who thinks he can just copy someone's client-side of a complete platform, and reverse engineer the server side is bound to get his head stuck in someone's ass sooner or later

Re:potential of Air ?

[Alistair Hutton]

Lots. The advantage the Flash Player has over Javascript, CSS and DHTML is the when I code something for the Flash Player I know what my 1 single target platform is. When I code for the browser I'm coding for x number of subtly incompatible targets. Yes, libraries can abstract away that to a degree but not wit the ease of (the admittedly closed source) Flpash Player. Plus the player has lots of bells and whistles that frankly are really nice to use.

AIR Linux - No Distro Love

[slummy]

I am on the Adobe Pre-release program and I've been testing AIR Linux since it was in engdrop form, it's never installed on Slackware or Sabayon. When will they release a version that will install across all distros? Nobody knows.

iPlayer for Mac Third Party much better

[Wizard Drongo]

The 3rd party ones are better. No DRM, no AIR....

www.lawrencedudley.co.uk/iplayer

Disclaimer: I helped make that on. But it IS good.
We'll be making iTunes playlist support soon....

Re:IPlayer UK only

[Anonymous Coward]

Brits pay for this content. If anybody could watch it the people that pay for the license fee would go fucking nuts.. Everything produced on the BBC comes out of the British people's pockets - there is no advertising revenue.. It's all from Joe Public.

To all the "how can I watch it in the US?" people - you might as well get it from a torrent, because it's just as legal.. At least admit your fucking over normal, hard-working people - they're the ones paying for it, not advertisers..

Technology discrimination

[williamhb]

Come to think of it, it's interesting that the BBC got burned for their decision only to support Windows for downloads, but haven't been told off for only supporting Adobe's platform for streaming, and tying even closer to them with the AIR announcement. (They usually draw complaints whenever they distort markets, not just when they make some viewers miss out)

Re:IPlayer UK only

[jedidiah]

I'd pay the tax in return for online access to all of the BeeB's stuff.

Re:IPlayer UK only

[thetoadwarrior]

To be fair people outside of the UK pay for the programmes they watch via advertising. Even going to the BBC website in a non-UK country should yield ads.

So the question is, have non-British people paid for iPlayer through advertising or not? If not, then why not give them iPlayer but with ads?

Re:Air/Flash License

[FishWithAHammer]

Too bad Theora sucks.

(And to head off the "OMG TROLL!" screams: Vorbis is an extremely good audio format, and one I use myself in my own projects because the libraries for it are reasonably good and easy to handle--but Theora is an absolute shit video format compared to pretty much everything else in common use.)

Re:Proxies ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Listening to the dulcet tones of those quaint peasant folk up north is half the enjoyment of regional programming. Sure, Rab C. Nesbitt and Still Game are fairly funny on the script alone, but would not have that charm nor pull of half the jokes if they were acted in the Queen's English rather than Glaswegian drawl.

Titanium

[_marshall]

Not sure if anyone here has seen us yet .. but Titanium is an open source/open web alternative to AIR that just had it's first Preview Release (PR1) a week ago. We currently support OSX and Windows , and are hard at work refactoring and getting a Linux release into the fold for our PR2 release in January.

We're licensed under ASL and using lots of open source techs (WebKit, Chromium, Gears, libXML, to name a few).. come check us out!
http://github.com/marshall/titanium/tree/master [github.com]
http://titaniumapp.com/ [titaniumapp.com]

Re:Air/Flash License

[m50d]

No. Theora is not state-of-the-art, but in terms of what the format specifies it's marginally better than mpeg-4 ASP aka DivX/XviD, which is still the most common video format in use today.

Re:potential of Air ?

[foniksonik]

Flash allows socket connections, data binding for true persistent state across an application, full complete support for managed vector graphics; audio; video; 3D objects and environments, local storage, remote shared storage (shared between users) and all of it is cross platform/browser.

Some of these can be addressed by running special server apps (a Comet server for socket connections, ie: push data to the client rather than pull from the server or polling from the server) or by using cutting edge browser specific technology (ie: Gears or HTML SQLLite storage in various browsers for local storage, or the Canvas object for managed vector data). However you can't do it all using a single API or cross platform/browser currently. It's rather hit/miss at the moment.

As a web developer I've replaces many of the common uses for Flash with bits of JQuery magic but I can't do things like Tweening audio and video and vector data based on user input for instance, so no media mixing with Javascript. You couldn't build an audio visualizer in javascript for example....

There are many more examples of what you can do with Flash that can not be currently done with Javascript + other tech.... but for 90% of what typical websites use it for... fancy navigation, cross-fading images, animating text - sure Javascript can handle that.